Healthy lung
Cancerous lung
Have a nice life.
Healthy lung
Cancerous lung
Have a nice life.
Why don't you spend your time more productively dealing with your own irrational fears?
Why are you so terribly concerned with the state of my blackened lungs when I couldn't care less (except to the extent it harms me) about that large missing part in your brain that deals with reason?
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The epidemiologic literature reports many risk factors for lung cancer that are independent of cigarette smoking. In other words, they are independent lung cancer risks for smokers and nonsmokers alike. Hence, epidemiologic studies of the association of lung cancer with active smoking or with environmental tobacco smoke must investigate and measure the interference of any and all independent risk factors. These factors carry the appropriate technical designation of confounders, and it is an illegal technical and professional procedure to draw conclusions from a study without a meticulous accounting of such confounders.
Active cigarette smoking. Obviously it is not possible to draw conclusions about the magnitude of cigarette smoking risk for lung cancer without a reasonably accurate account of the possible influence of confounders. Yet, none of the studies of cigarette smoking and lung cancer reported by the U.S. Surgeon General (USSG, 1979) have taken into account any of the confounders here listed. The likely reason is that most of those studies were performed in the ‘50s and ‘60s, when the confounding risk factor here listed had yet to be reported.
Thus, it if it were possible to account for the inevitable interferences of confounders, the magnitude of the relative risk and the numbers of lung cancers now attributed to smoking would have to be corrected downward, and likely substantially so. Sir Richard Doll, the dean of antismoking epidemiologists, aknowledged the discrepancy as he wrote: “...[active] smoking seems to act synergistically with other aetiologic agents such as consumption of alcohol; various aspects of the diet; levels of blood pressure, blood lipids, or other cardiovascular risk factors; or exposure to asbestos, radon, or possibly some infective factors. The quantitative effect of smoking will, therefore, vary with variation in the prevalence of these other factors.” (Doll et al., 1994). Although Doll did not mention all the risk factors here listed, his admission is tantamount to stating that the magnitude of the risk and the number of lung cancer cases that could be attributed to cigarette smoking remain unknown.
Environmental tobacco smoke (ETS). Even if one were to use the illegal statistical and epidemiologic distortions introduced by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to dream up a conclusion about the lung cancer risk of ETS (USEPA, 1992), the currently available studies on this topic could not conjure up a relative risk greater than 1.05, namely an incongruous 5% elevation (Gori and Luik, 1999). Assuming for sake of argument that such an assessment were technically correct, it would be 20 to 300 times smaller as compared respectively to the lowest and highest risk factors here listed. It is undeniable, therefore, that even a slight confounding by any or many of the confounders here listed could have a much greater inpact in any study of ETS and lung cancer than the possible impact of ETS itself. Yet, the ETS and lung cancer studies so far published have accounted erratically for no more than a handful of the confounders here listed, thus making absolutely moot any interpretation of the possible association of ETS exposure and lung cancer.
How to read the following table. The first column describes the nature of the risk factors investigated. The second column gives the name of the first author of each study that has reported separately on the risk factor listed on the first column to the left. The complete bibliography of each study can be found alphabetically by author in the list of references. The third column lists the most likely and best estimate of the highest risk reported by each study. The risks are given as relative risks, namely relative to the risk of people not exposed to the risk factor under study. The fourth and last column gives the 95% confidence interval for each risk listed. The interval is a measure of the statistical uncertainty of the risk values listed in the third column, and indicates that the true value of the risk may be anywhere between the low and high figures in the fourth column, with a 1 in 20 probability of error.